We need to talk about our billionaire worship problem.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson said something in a recent livestream that’s been living rent-free in my head: we shouldn’t be honoring people like Elon Musk just because they’ve piled up obscene amounts of money. The real question is:

What is wrong with you that you need to hoard that much?

In America, we treat a ten-figure net worth like it’s a personality trait. If you’re a billionaire, we’re told, you must be a genius, a visionary, a job creator, a patriot, maybe even a messiah in a hoodie. Questioning that is treated as bad manners at best and communism at worst.

This post is about ripping that mask off.

Because behind the “innovator” cosplay and PR fluff, what we actually have is a class of hoarders sitting on dragon piles of money — and using their wealth to reshape politics, law, and culture in ways that screw everyone else.

And just to put a nice sharp point on it: over the past few decades, the richest 1% have walked off with around $50 trillion that would otherwise have gone to the bottom 90% of Americans if the old, more equal distribution of growth had simply continued.

So let’s stop asking, “How can I be more like Elon Musk?” and start asking, “Why did we build an economy where one guy can burn through $44 billion on a social media tantrum while a whole generation is drowning in student debt?”

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I. The “Job Creator” Myth

For forty years, Republicans have sold us one core economic bedtime story:

“Rich people and big corporations are the job creators.
Cut their taxes, slash regulations, and they’ll invest more, build more, and hire more. Eventually, the benefits will trickle down to you, citizen mudsill.”

It’s Reaganomics in a nutshell. Tax cuts at the top are sold as a generous gift to the bottom.

Here’s what actually happens when you shower corporations and billionaires with windfalls:

• They buy back their own stock to juice the share price.
• They shower the C-suite in stock options and bonuses.
• They park even more wealth in real estate, index funds, private equity, and offshore accounts.

What they do not do, in any consistent, systemic way, is raise wages, strengthen unions, or build stable, middle-class jobs.

Productivity goes up. Profits go up. CEO pay explodes. Wages barely move.

You know what does “trickle down”?

• Stagnating paychecks.
• Layoffs and “right-sizing.”
• Do-more-with-less burnout.

And then, insult to injury, you get lectured by people in $5,000 suits about the dignity of work.

So let’s stop dignifying this as an economic theory. It’s not “trickle-down.” It’s a siphon.

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II. The Billionaire Excess List of Shame: What They Actually Spend It On

To understand who we’re dealing with, follow the money. Here’s a non-exhaustive “List of Shame” — not because spending money is evil, but because these people are the loudest voices demanding tax cuts for themselves while preaching “responsibility” to everyone else.

1. Jeff Bezos: Superyachts and Fairy-Tale Weddings

Jeff Bezos is not out here building armies of middle-class jobs out of the goodness of his shaved head. He’s buying monuments to himself.

• $500 million sailing yacht “Koru,” plus a $75 million support yacht “Abeona.”
  His 417-foot sailing yacht Koru reportedly cost about $500 million, and he tacked on a 246-foot “shadow yacht” Abeona for another ~$75 million, just so the toys and staff have a place to live.
• A wedding that likely cost tens of millions.
  His 2024 Venice wedding to Lauren Sánchez involved superyachts, a medieval fortress island, and VIP everything. Estimates put the overall price tag in the tens of millions of dollars.

Is it illegal? No. Is it tasteful when your warehouse workers are peeing in bottles to make quota? Also no.

This is what “job creator” money looks like in the wild: floating palaces and spectacle, not higher wages or stable communities.

2. Mark Zuckerberg: The $300 Million Bunker Paradise in Hawaii

Mark Zuckerberg is literally building a private world to retreat into.

• A sprawling, secretive Hawaiian compound worth over $300 million.
  Investigations show his compound on Kauai — now over 2,300 acres — has development costs reported at $300 million+, with multiple mansions, heavy security, and an underground bunker complex.

Locals are justifiably furious. Parts of the estate sit near or atop Native Hawaiian burial grounds. NDAs mean workers can’t talk about what they find. The resource footprint is massive.

So when you hear Zuckerberg talk about “connecting the world,” remember he’s also spending hundreds of millions to physically separate himself from it, in an island-sized panic room.

Again: this is what our era’s “innovation” money buys. Not affordable housing. Not public infrastructure. A rich guy’s personal level in the apocalypse.

3. Larry Ellison: Buying an Island and an Information Empire

Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, had a different idea: don’t just buy a yacht, buy an island.

• 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lānaʻi for about $300 million.
  In 2012, Ellison bought 98% of Lānaʻi for roughly $300 million, then spent hundreds of millions more remodeling luxury resorts and reshaping the island’s economy around his ownership.

Residents live and work on land he controls. Lose your job with his company and you may lose your housing too. It’s a 19th-century company town with modern branding.

He’s also deep in the luxury-resort game elsewhere, snapping up high-end properties like a Palm Beach resort that was initially listed north of $300 million.

This is not “job creation.” This is feudalism with better lighting.

• And let’s not forget his son David Ellison and his growing right-wing media empire.
  In 2025, after buying his way into Paramount Skydance, David Ellison spent about $150 million to acquire The Free Press and promptly installed its founder Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, reporting directly to him — a tidy way to bolt a hard-right, “anti-woke” opinion machine onto a legacy broadcast news brand. In other words, “Fox-lite.”

4. Elon Musk: $44 Billion for a Megaphone and Billions More for MAGA Politics

Elon Musk is the patron saint of the “rich guy is a savior” myth, and he’s used that myth to grab a terrifying amount of leverage.

• $44 billion to buy Twitter (now X).
  In 2022, Musk bought Twitter outright for $44 billion.
  Since then, the platform has lurched hard toward the far right, with documented spikes in hate speech and disinformation and a flood of extremist content gaining visibility. (Advertisers noticed. So did users.)
• Hundreds of millions in direct political spending.
  Post–Citizens United, Musk and his billionaire friends have treated elections like auctions. Just 100 billionaire families spent a record $2.6 billion in the 2024 federal cycle alone — one in every six dollars in the entire election.

Musk isn’t just playing on the field. He’s buying pieces of the stadium — the scoreboard, the loudspeakers, the cameras, and now the AI that decides what you see and when.

Again, that’s where a big chunk of “job creator” money actually goes: not into your paycheck, but into platforms and political machines designed to keep your paycheck small and your boss untouchable.

5. Peter Thiel: Doomsday Lodges and a Parallel MAGA Economy

Peter Thiel, the vampire squid of libertarian tech money, has a simple plan: profit off the system while building escape hatches in case it collapses.

• A multimillion-dollar New Zealand doomsday estate.
  Thiel paid about $13.5 million for a massive property on New Zealand’s South Island and sought permission for a lodge complex that looked a lot like a luxury bunker for when things go sideways.
• Tens of millions into hard-right politics and a “parallel economy.”
  He’s pumped over $30 million into far-right candidates and projects aimed at building a “parallel” MAGA-aligned economy and tech ecosystem.

He’s not spending his money trying to strengthen democracy. He’s hedging against it.

6. Charles Koch and Friends: Dark Money and Democracy on Layaway

Charles Koch and his late brother David are the godfathers of the modern oligarch machine.

• Billions funneled into politics over decades.
  Koch-linked networks like Americans for Prosperity have spent hundreds of millions of dollars per cycle pushing tax cuts for the wealthy, fossil fuel deregulation, union-busting, and school privatization. Recent cycles have seen spending north of $150 million from just one Koch super PAC.

This isn’t “participation in the democratic process.” It’s ownership.

These are not outliers. They’re representative samples of a class that treats opulence as a right and the rest of us as mudsills — the permanent under-floor support structure that exists so their great rooms can sit higher.

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III. Wealth Inequality in America: History’s Greatest Heist

The yachts and bunkers are just the symptoms. The disease is the forty-year upward transfer of wealth that paid for all of it.

A. The Big Number: About $50 Trillion Upward

Economists using data from the RAND Corporation asked a simple question:

What if the gains from economic growth since the late 1970s had been distributed the way they were in the few decades after World War II?

Answer: the bottom 90% of Americans would have received about $50 trillion more in income than they actually did.

Instead, that money went to the top 1%.

Think about that:

• That’s the missing raise you never got.
• The missing savings you never built.
• The missing down payment, retirement cushion, and emergency fund that never appeared.

If that money had reached ordinary wage earners, median incomes would be roughly double what they are now.

Instead, we got a handful of people with more wealth than some countries, and a society where half the population can’t cover a $1,000 surprise expense without panic.

B. The Middle Class Wasn’t “Left Behind.” It Was Pushed (Off A Cliff).

Pew Research looked at how wealth is distributed now versus the early 1980s. From 1983 to 2016:

• The share of total U.S. wealth held by upper-income families jumped from 60% to 79%.
• The share held by the middle class was nearly cut in half — from 32% down to 17%.

That isn’t drift. That’s deliberate redesign.

Policy after policy — tax cuts skewed to high earners, deregulation, union-busting, offshoring, privatization — all pointed in one direction: up.

If you feel like you’re busting your ass and standing still, it’s because you’re running on a treadmill someone else controls the speed on — while they collect rent for letting you use it.

C. Meanwhile, People Under 50 Got Debt Instead of a Ladder

You mentioned younger Americans with six figures of student debt and no path forward. That’s not a bug either.

• Total student loan debt in the U.S. is about $1.8 trillion, held by roughly 42–43 million borrowers.
• The average federal student loan balance is around $39,000–$40,000, with many borrowers carrying far more.

For an entire generation, the message was:

“You must go to college to be middle class.
We will make it ruinously expensive.
Then we will call you irresponsible for being in debt.”

All this happened in the same era that:

• Corporate profits hit records,
• The stock market soared,
• CEO pay went to Mars,
• And billionaires multiplied like mushrooms after rain.

You weren’t failing the system. The system was extracting from you.

D. Billionaires Didn’t Just Take the Money — They Snatched the Damned Microphone

Here’s the kicker: after hoovering up the gains, they spent a slice of that loot to lock in the rules.

In the 2024 federal election cycle alone:

• Just 100 billionaire families spent a record $2.6 billion trying to shape the outcome. That’s one of every six dollars spent in the entire election.

Because being rich just isn’t enough. They’re re-writing the script.

That’s why the policy conversation keeps circling back to:

• More tax cuts “we can’t afford to reverse.”
• More privatization of public goods.
• More blaming teachers, nurses, and immigrants for problems created by the donor class.

And then they ask why half the country feels furious and betrayed.

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IV. So What Do We Do With This Anger?

First, we stop worshiping billionaires. Full stop.

No more reflexive “job creator” deference for people whose main job seems to be vacuuming wealth out of communities and into bunkers, yachts, and super PACs.

We start recognizing:

• Wealth is not virtue.
• Rich is not the same as wise.
• Owning platforms and politicians does not make you a patriot.

We also stop gaslighting ourselves. You are not crazy for feeling like the game is rigged against you. The game is rigged against you, and the numbers back that up. So when you go to bed every night and your ass hurts, it ain’t from sitting down..

Second, we build a different hero list.

The people who keep a democracy alive are:

• Teachers, nurses, and caregivers.
• Workers who keep critical systems running.
• Organizers, journalists, and local officials fighting to make policy serve people instead of donors.
• Small businesses and co-ops trying to build local resilience instead of extraction.

Those are the people we should be putting on posters and teaching kids to emulate — not the guy who bought an island or the dude building a $300 million bunker on stolen land.

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V. Wolverines, Not Mudsills

Here at No Wimps Politics, we call our community the No Wimps Army “Wolverines” — a nod to Red Dawn and a reminder that we are not spectators.

If you’re reading this and feeling that hot mix of anger and clarity, congratulations: you’re already Wolverine material.

Being a Wolverine doesn’t mean you hate wealth or success. It means you:

• Refuse to let billionaires hide behind fairy tales while they siphon off your future.
• Refuse to confuse “rich” with “right.”
• Refuse to be the permanent underclass — the mudsills — politely holding up the party upstairs.

It also means you’re ready to look deeper than this post.

Because the yachts and bunkers are just one front in the war on democracy.

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VI. Teaser: Coming Next Week — How Billionaires Weaponized Schools and Churches Against Democracy

Everything we just talked about — the money, the media, the yachts — is only half the story.

The other half is where that money goes when billionaires want to shape souls, not just markets.

Next Monday’s NWP deep dive:

“How Billionaires Weaponized Schools and Churches Against Democracy”

We’re going to walk through:

• How right-wing billionaires and dark-money networks quietly funded “school choice,” Christian nationalist curricula, and university programs designed to teach kids that unregulated capitalism is God’s favorite economic system.
• How churches and private schools became pipelines for “obedience to your betters” wrapped in religious language.
• How all of this ties back to the same core project: locking in that $50 trillion upward transfer by training the next generation to worship wealth and distrust democracy.

If this post was the x-ray, next week is the MRI.

Stay mad. Stay focused. Wolverines.

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